Alejo's Tenuki

A couple of days ago, I found myself encouraging another player to play a few games everyday and review them, in order to develop "intuition". Intuition, believe it or not, is a very important tool in the Go world. At the lower levels, training intuition raises your level at an incredible rate; while playing by intuition some easy moves, players can avoid reading every move and save time for the important or complicated ones.

How to train intuition?

It’s important that you keep on playing a regular amount of games each day… not too much, people usually recommend playing around 4-5 games and review them afterwards. In fact, the most important thing about playing is reviewing the games calmly on your own, to realise by yourself where did you do the mistakes. So, my opinion is: play as many games as you can review. If you have little time, play one game and review it, if you have the entire day, you can play 5 of them.

Though it is true that reaching 5k level without reading at all is not very common, there is no doubt that training intuition is very important at the beginning; personally, I think that I reached about 12k level just by intuition, and then stopped playing regularly. I guess I could have gone a little bit farther with it, but the lack of play led me to this 9k "platform" where I have been for the last months.

At the beginning it shows you good and bad shape as well as the direction of the game. As you keep growing, intuition marks you the correct time to attack and to defend, where to invade and where is your key point. Yes, you can do all these by reading, but you might want to save that minute for the next move.

Don’t stop training intuition, you’ll always learn something new from it.

We all know KGS, you may like it, you may dislike it. But we must all agree in how crazy his rating is.

Last September, KGS decided to modify its internal rating. Now, it is supposed to be more difficult to reach high levels while the lower levels are narrower; so lots of players concentrate at the 15k-1k zone. Everyone was affected by this change and players’ rating grew about 5 stones by this procedure. Everyone was affected in the same way, so all your opponents also increased by 5 stones their level.

It is well-known that internet ratings are slightly higher than the real ones: as you can see KGS’ ratings are always a few stones higher than AGA’s or European’s on the lowest levels which should be restored somewhere later to have a good equivalence on the higher ratings.

Where is that?

It’s on the 9k. As you can see, a 9k KGS player varies up to 4 stones on each real scale.

 AGA   CHINA  EUROPE   JAPAN   KOREA  |  IGS  DGS  KGS ---   -----  ------   -----   -----  |  ---  ---  ---   26K    30K     28K     25K    32Gup  |  BC 25K    29K     27K     24K    31Gup  |  BC 24K    28K     26K     23K    30Gup  |  BC 23K    27K     25K     22K    29Gup  |  BC   25K 22K    26K     24K     21K    28Gup  |  BC   24K 21K    25K     23K     20K    27Gup  |  22K  23K   15K 20K    24K     22K     19K    26Gup  |  22K  22K   15K 19K    23K     21K     18K    25Gup  |  21K  21K   14K 18K    22K     20K     17K    24Gup  |  21K  20K   13K 17K    21K     19K     16K    23Gup  |  20K  19K   13K 16K    20K     18K     15K    22Gup  |  20K  18K   12K 15K    19K     17K     14K    21Gup  |  19K  17K   12K 14K    18K     16K     13K    20Gup  |  18K  16K   11K 13K    17K     15K     12K    19Gup  |  17K  15K   11K 12K    16K     14K     11K    18Gup  |  16K  14K   10K 12K    15K     14K     11K    18Gup  |  15K  14K   10K 11K    14K     13K     10K    17Gup  |  14K  13K    9K 10K    13K     12K      9K    16Gup  |  13K  12K    9K  9K    12K     11K      8K    15Gup  |  12K  11K    9K  8K    11K     10K      7K    14Gup  |  10K  10K    9K  7K    10K      9K      6K    13Gup  |  9K    9K    8K  6K     9K      8K      5K    12Gup  |  8K    8K    7K  5K     8K      7K      4K    11Gup  |  7K    7K    6K  4K     7K      6K      3K    10Gup  |  6K    6K    5K  3K     6K      5K      2K     9Gup  |  5K    5K    4K  2K     5K      4K      1K     8Gup  |  4K    4K    3K  1K     4K      3K     *1D     7Gup  |  3K    3K    2K *1D     3K      2K      2D     6Gup  |  2K    2K    1K  2D     2K      1K      3D     5Gup  |  1K    1K   *1D  3D     1K     *1D      4D     4Gup  | *1D   *1D    2D  4D    *1D      2D    4-5D     3Gup  |  2D    2D    3D  5D     2D      3D    5-6D     2Gup  |  3D    3D    4D  6D     3D      4D    6-7D     1Gup  |  4D    4D    5D  7D             5D                   |              6D  8D             6D                   |              7D  9D             7D                   |              8D 10D                                  |              9D

This table is extracted from Sensei’s Library: World Wide Comparison.

So, if KGS has to recovers this 4 stones at the 9k level… why didn’t they leave the old system? Sincerely, I don’t know the answer. I don’t mean that KGS2 rating is better than KGS3, but it may have been more "real".

Talking about "better"… I think that none of the KGS rating systems are good. For example: how can you improve your level at KGS? By NOT playing.

In fact, my original account at KGS "alejo" showed this image today:

Which is something obviously wrong. I haven’t played with this name for a couple of months and there are only 3 games listed for the last 6 months… As you can see, inactivity is the best way to increase your rating.

The real fact is that I’m at 9k. Yes, 9k at KGS, which means that I don’t know where I’m at all.

Recently my life has been totally redirected in a new and unexpected direction.

This was my life until three months ago:

1. Study up to 12 hours per day. Fail the final exam.
2. Drive a dangerous car aged over 14 years.
3. Go is wonderful!!! Go is the best game in the world!! Learn and enjoy Go. Teach it to some friends.

Currently:

1. Work, up to 35 hours per week and study for the exam I didn’t pass.
2. Buy this meravellous thing you can see on the right side.
3. Disappointed about internet go players. Don’t play much go.
Moreover, don’t play go for an entire week.

Obviously this is the natural sequence of modern life itself, but for the last statement. For some reasons I’m not aware of, I’m not playing go at all. Indeed, the last game I played I found an opponent who was so rude as to make me resign after the first 50 moves. And it made me think about why I play Go. Go is, at the end of the day, a game, a hobby for all of us but a few professional players.

You can say you are very interested in it, you may spend hours studying pro games… but Go will remain a game. Extracted from "Games" at Wikipedia.org: Acording to French sociologist Roger Caillois, in his book Les jeux et les hommes (Games and Men)(1957), defined a game as an activity that must have the following characteristics:

As we can see, one of the first characteristics for a game to have place is to be light-hearted, making the players have fun. Being rude, expressing hate… all these feelings and behaviours shouldn’t take place on such scenaries.

If you feel you don’t have fun on a game, resign.

You might think that you’ll be losing a few points on your rating, but you should consider a couple thoughts here: having many "funless" games might your curiosity in Go, and do you really mind that much about points?

Sincerely, I just want to play decently well at Go, being a low 3k or a high 4k doesn’t make any sense to me, being a 10k or a 20k represents quite a red line, one which you won’t cross by just losing a game you are not enjoying. Finish it as soon as possible or resign, take a breath, empty your mind and prepare for the next joyful game.

Life goes on.

As some of you already know, I’m planning to do a comparison between three comercial products: The Many faces of Go, SmartGo and Moyo Go Studio. This comparison won’t be made on a video, but each program will be reviewed separatedly. As you can imagine, this programs offer a great amount of features, so I just focus on a few of them.

In this case, I start with "The many faces of Go" in its 11th version, available at www.smart-games.com.

I’ve improved the quality and the compression of the videos to be at a 1024*700 resolution on the full version, which is available at my own server.

Here you have the first part of the videoreview:

And here’s the second part of it:

The reviewer was a 3k on KGS and he couldn’t find anything but bad moves coming from me. One of the most repeated sentences was: "think at least a few seconds before playing each move", which appears something like a dozen times.

Indeed, I’ve realised how many unnecessary moves I make following my opponent’s moves. Many of my moves are played automatically after my enemy places a stone on the board and I end up using about half of the time given. This results on sente wasted batching somethings which are already safe and a decrease of my reading ability.

Therefore, I’m going to focus on Tsumego. Why?

First of all, Tsumego trains your life-and-death reading ability. I’m going to solve them totally before placing the first stone; and by "solving" I really mean "solving" them till I’m convinced there is chance that my rival escapes or that I’m totally safe. Obviously, this takes a certain amount of time, that is why I’m going to start doing it at a little scale: working on 10 tsumegos each day. I’d give up solving 50 tsumegos daily after the few days, so this is an appropiate amount for me, without being to much, it’s better than none at all.

Studying tsumego I expect to be able to calm down my nerves when facing such situations, see if I can play a little bit more relaxed and think twice (at least) on what I would play as an automated move.

According to the result of the last poll: "Which program you’d like to be reviewed?", I’ve made the videoreview of Kombilo. As some of you already know, Kombilo is a pattern search engine, i.e. you enter a specific position on a board, and the program looks for this specific position in its game database.

There are still a few things hanging in my mind, so I think I’ll make another videoreview about this program, but about a specific section: how to make custom menus.

Here you have the video for direct download, with a much better resolution and quality: Kombilo’s.

This review has been made with a sample collection of 998 games, so as to offer some proper results without overloading the computer.

One thing I’ll say once again: the quality of this program is directly proportional with the quality of your game collection. If you have very little amount of professional games, you’ll get very little results. If you have a huge collection based on low-level amateur players, the results won’t be of good quality. Now, it’s up to you to decide which games you include and which ones you don’t.

I hope you enjoy it, and let me know your opinion!!